said a cool female voice behind him. He jumped round. Viann and two guards with levelled dazers confronted him. Her lips were beautiful but her smile was unnerving.
‘Well, warrior?’ Crooner asked defiantly, looking up at the man who stood on the threshold of his cell, his thumbs tucked theatrically in his belt.
‘Your turn for interrogation. Look lively,’ the man said. He was an ugly looking brute: Crooner thought it wise to jump to his feet at once.
He was marched along the course Carappa and Brandyholm had taken earlier. Now he too faced Master Scott. They exchanged greetings in surly fashion as the guard left them to confront each other
‘Where were you born?’ Scott snapped.
‘Somewhere in the tangles.’
‘Why?’
‘My parents were fugitives from their tribe – one of the little Midway tribes. My father ran amok, I believe. It often happens. I was fully grown when I joined the Greene tribe.’
‘Have you proof of all that?’ Scott asked, elongating his mouth to a mere slit.
‘Why do you need to ask these questions?’
Scott caught him a ringing slap across the face and repeated in the same dead level tone, ‘Have you proof of all that?’
Crooner put his hand up to his cheek, and then suddenly pounced with arms extended. He was not quick enough. Master Scott chopped his arms expertly and ducked to one side; as he ducked, he produced a short rubber cosh, with which he smashed a blow behind Crooner’s knee. Crooner collapsed onto the floor.
‘Your reflexes are too slow,’ Scott said. ‘You should easily have been able to take me by surprise then.’
‘I was always called slow in Quarters.’
‘How long have you been with the Greene tribe?’ Scott demanded, standing over Crooner and waggling the cosh as if eager to use it again.
‘Oh – twice a hundred dozen sleep-wakes.’
‘We do not use your primitive method of calculating time here. We call four sleep-wakes one day. That would make your stay in Quarters six hundred days. A long time in a man’s life.’
Crooner made no reply to this. At that juncture an excited man burst into the room and grabbed Scott by the arm.
‘You’re needed at once at the barricades!’ he exclaimed. ‘An attack is developing. Everyone is needed.’
‘Right, I’m coming,’ Scott said. Without another glance at Crooner, they hurried from the room, leaving him sprawled on the floor.
In some alarm, Brandyholm looked up from the spyhole through which he had been observing this interview.
‘So the business about the attack at the barricades is just bluff to get Master Scott out of the room?’ he asked Viann.
She nodded. ‘There are no barricades.’
‘Why?’
She closed her spy-hole before answering. When she did reply, her voice was slow and held none of the confidence her appearance suggested. ‘For the final part of this rough test we have devised for you, of course. Now that you have passed this test, I can explain.’
‘It was not – not a bravery test, was it?’
‘If it was you would hardly have passed it, would you?’ Viann was inspecting him closely, and he found himself looking reluctantly into her eyes. They were very clear and held an alertness which sent nervous excitement through him. Finally she said, ‘Listen, Tom Brandyholm, this ship has been travelling a long time – too long, far too long. It is slowly becoming a ghost ship. Two chief problems confront us; one you can guess: how to control the ship, and make it stop somewhere. If it does not stop, only death can await us.’ She stopped there, her eyes brooding, and finally said, ‘That problem seems insuperable … But the other problem is one we can deal with. There is a strange race on this ship – a new race that was not here before.’
‘You mean – a new tribe, like the Greene tribe?’ he asked, looking anxiously at her strained beauty (so much more desirable than Gwenny had ever been).
‘No, nothing like that!’ she said impatiently. ‘A super-natural race, masquerading as men! You know the ponic tangles, don’t you?’
Brandyholm nodded dumbly, recalling the thickets they had ploughed through before being captured.
‘In those tangles,’ Viann continued, ‘a new race has generated itself, or so I believe. Half the ship is filled with that silent, impenetrable ponic growth, and somewhere, somewhere this race has been born. They come in from their secret centre to spy upon us and learn our ways. But although they try to, they do not and cannot behave like us in all respects. All strangers who are found near Forwards are now subjected to tests, devised to weed out these aliens. You have just undergone your test. Crooner has now almost finished his.’
How do you tell these – aliens?’ Brandyholm asked.
‘For one thing, they seem to be longer lived than we; consequently, their actions are slower. They seem calmer in manner, more phlegmatic.’
She would have said more, but Master Scott entered the room. Triumph lent his face an unaccustomed liveliness. He looked searchingly at Brandyholm, and then said, ‘Your friend Bob Crooner is proved to be an alien. It is definite.’
‘What?’ exclaimed Brandyholm.
‘I suspected as much,’ Viann said. ‘We watched his interview from the spyholes here.’
‘How did you prove it?’ Brandyholm asked.
‘We’ve just had the final proof. When I left him alone, he made out by the other door, just as you did. He saw Carappa, but hardly paused. Instead, he hurried on and escaped into the ponic tangle.’
‘How does that prove anything?’
‘You, when you were escaping, still had to stop and perform the fear ceremony over the dead. Why? Because from birth all of us on the ship are taught that ceremony as routine. Not so Crooner! He scarcely broke his stride. You see, his upbringing has been – different. He is of the alien company.’
‘He was always different,’ Brandyholm muttered reflectively. ‘Cheerful … slow … saying little.’ Then he bowed his head, shaken to think he had lived with the man and cautiously liked him.
‘Crooner is now being followed by our men,’ Scott continued. ‘He will lead them to the secret haunts of the aliens. And then – we will hunt them out and slay them all. My mouth waters at the thought of that killing. You will help us, Brandyholm?’
Silence. Viann’s eyes upon him.
‘No,’ Brandyholm said. ‘You killed my priest, who was no alien. To the devil with you all.’
He did not look up, hunched tensely, waiting to be struck. The blow never came. Instead, footsteps came over to him,
